"Recorded across East London, South-East Kent and Snaresbrook Crown Court during what is described as 'the UK media's attempt at divining integrity from the orchestrated turbulence of Brexit', with the record setting out to 'juggle the documentation of this particular moment with the desire to discern motivation from despair'. World In Action takes in field recordings, woodwind freakouts and percussion from Valentina Magaletti amongst other elements." --The Quietus

London-based experimentalist Luke Younger (aka Helm) returns to PAN with Olympic Mess, a record born of destructive practice, competing desires, and troubled optimism. Where his previous effort, 2014's The Hollow Organ (PAN 050EP), dealt in dense, distressed sonics, Olympic Mess is Younger responding to a period spent engaged with loop-based industrial music, dub techno, and balearic disco. These musical references, all of which can induce hypnotic states and feelings of euphoria, inform ten evocative aural landscapes that unfurl over the course of an hour and act almost as a counterpoint to the turmoil that spawned them. "It's about exploring a perverse desire to pull the rug from under yourself, and the struggle to achieve a healthy equilibrium between one's personal and artistic lives," Younger says. "Dealing with the problematic consequences of pushing your own limits, forming and dissolving relationships, transient lifestyles, physical and mental exhaustion, excess, and other kinds of personal chaos." Crafted using an array of heavily processed samples, found sound, and electroacoustics, personal conflict manifests in "I Exist in a Fog" and "Outerzone 2015," in which visceral noise disintegrates into veiled, ambient strata. The disquieting crescendos of "The Evening in Reverse" and "Fluid Cloak" offer no such relief, while the title-track and "Don't Lick the Jacket" are mineral, multilayered abstractions twisting around a brittle pulse. Following a period of extensive touring throughout the States and Europe, which included 20 dates in support of Danish punk group Iceage, Olympic Mess was recorded in London, New York, and Berlin by Sean Ragon, Luke Younger, and John Hannon. The album is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. It features photography by Kim Thue and artwork by Bill Kouligas.

Double LP version. Pressed on 140-gram vinyl. London-based experimentalist Luke Younger (aka Helm) returns to PAN with Olympic Mess, a record born of destructive practice, competing desires, and troubled optimism. Where his previous effort, 2014's The Hollow Organ (PAN 050EP), dealt in dense, distressed sonics, Olympic Mess is Younger responding to a period spent engaged with loop-based industrial music, dub techno, and balearic disco. These musical references, all of which can induce hypnotic states and feelings of euphoria, inform ten evocative aural landscapes that unfurl over the course of an hour and act almost as a counterpoint to the turmoil that spawned them. "It's about exploring a perverse desire to pull the rug from under yourself, and the struggle to achieve a healthy equilibrium between one's personal and artistic lives," Younger says. "Dealing with the problematic consequences of pushing your own limits, forming and dissolving relationships, transient lifestyles, physical and mental exhaustion, excess, and other kinds of personal chaos." Crafted using an array of heavily processed samples, found sound, and electroacoustics, personal conflict manifests in "I Exist in a Fog" and "Outerzone 2015," in which visceral noise disintegrates into veiled, ambient strata. The disquieting crescendos of "The Evening in Reverse" and "Fluid Cloak" offer no such relief, while the title-track and "Don't Lick the Jacket" are mineral, multilayered abstractions twisting around a brittle pulse. Following a period of extensive touring throughout the States and Europe, which included 20 dates in support of Danish punk group Iceage, Olympic Mess was recorded in London, New York, and Berlin by Sean Ragon, Luke Younger, and John Hannon. The album is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. It features photography by Kim Thue and artwork by Bill Kouligas.

PAN presents four vital concrète incursions by nether field-traveler Luke Younger aka Helm, marking his first transmissions since the studio rituals that birthed his highly-acclaimed Impossible Symmetry and Silencer releases. The Hollow Organ toes a deliberate line in the mud between his previous transgressions and a chokingly dank realization of his most untoward, paralytic sound. Poised as a dark interpreter between the grotesque and the transcendent, he activates research gleaned from his petrifying live performances coupled with an increasingly squalid and visceral palette of anguished machine voices, sub-zero drones and bone-scraped rhythmic noise to divine, unearthly space somewhere between semi-legal horror soundtrack and hyperstitious surreality. Its opening gambit, "Carrier" is the most succinct and uncannily ambiguous; perilously close to Gas-like ambient pop but rescued from serenity by manic tape spool and an excoriating, demonic vocal. The vortex of "Analogues" proceeds, ploughed by stereo-twinned engines of churning tape loops to a pitch-black, eschatological climax, and "Spiteful Jester" feels like the unshakable onset of a panic attack, ratcheting the intensity with a blank-eyed, stoic method. For ten minutes "The Hollow Organ" drains last with an unnerving, quiet blood-letting of carmine iron drones evaporating ferric overtones while percussions clank in your blind-spot behind the screen.

Warehouse find, last copies. Impossible Symmetry is the third full length record by Helm, the project of London-based artist Luke Younger. It marks a new chapter in the artists' canon as it's his first to be informed by live performance rather than studio experimentation. The recording and engineering was primarily a solo venture, with some technical assistance from John Hannon on a few tracks. Most of the compositions were created out of ideas/improvisations that were conceived in a live context and then fed back into the studio work. The album was recorded over the duration of a year in London with source material culled from acoustic sound sources in a similar methodology to his previous album, Cryptography, while also simultaneously incorporating more extensive use of electronic elements and moments of rhythmic dark ambience recalling the outputs from early Coil and Cabaret Voltaire to even Traversable Wormhole's industrial minimalism. His last LP, Cryptography, presented a five-part suite of expertly rendered electro-acoustic study which uses processed piano, Casio MT-40, cymbal and broken guitar strings. Younger creates a world where these instruments morph into spectral rust, a shimmering klang swims alongside passive noise and the relationship between acoustic and electronic derived sounds forms a solid foundation. This sound is steered through a mélange of fringe territories: glacial drone meditations, reconfigured gamelan clusters, and howling walls of organized feedback, all coalesced in a post-industrial fashion with a commitment to homemade exploratory zeal. For the past ten years, Younger has also performed extensively in Europe and the U.S. with Steven Warwick as pioneering avant-drone duo Birds Of Delay. The LP was mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, pressed on 140 gram vinyl and comes in a poly-lined inner sleeve. It is packaged in a pro-press color jacket which itself is housed in a silkscreened PVC sleeve with photos by Traianos Pakioufakis and artwork by Kathryn Politis and Bill Kouligas.